May 1, 2010
Guerrilla Usability: Insight on a Shoestring
I had the opportunity to speak about Guerrilla Usability at Iowa Code Camp yesterday — what a well-executed event. If you’re a techie in the Iowa area, definitely check out their next event in November.
I tried to accomplish two things with the talk: putting out a solid definition of usability and what usability testing is trying to achieve; and throwing a whole bunch of ideas and tools out to see what sticks, whet their appetite, and hopefully prompt people to at least give something a try. Here’s the video of the presentation:
Guerrilla Usability: Insight on a Shoestring from David Sturtz on Vimeo.
Iterative and Agile development mean shorter cycles and a desperate need for quick feedback. Luckily, improving the user experience of your software doesn’t require days in a lab. This session will present more than twenty-five tools and techniques for gaining insight into your users’ minds and actions.
Dowloads
Slides [PDF]: Guerrilla Usability
Audio [MP3]: Guerrilla Usability
February 11, 2010
Being Agile
I was invited to speak to a local group of Business Analysts this week on the subject of Agile development. The talk was well received, and seemed to help several people grasp the value that Agile can offer.
Being Agile from David Sturtz on Vimeo.
View “Being Agile” at slideshare.net.
Download the PDF of Being Agile.
“Being Agile” presents an introduction to Scrum, an Agile software development methodology. In addition to the basics of the iterative development process and roles, this talk explores Agile concepts related to requirements, documentation, communication, planning, and overall business strategy.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 United States License.
August 6, 2008
Experimenting with work/life alignment
(This is for all both of you who have been ‘begging’ me to blog more, hope it’s worth it.)
I’m massively out of touch with the blogosphere lately (currently 42,035 unread items in Bloglines), so I may be bit behind the curve with this, but last week I learned about Total Leadership from a post on Tim Ferriss’s blog.
I’ve watched the video of Stew Friedman’s Total Leadership Google Talk (embedded after the jump), and have begun the process of examining the quadrants of my life, and devising experiments to help to bring them closer together. The goal is to achieve a ‘four-way win’ meeting the expectations of stakeholders in all areas of your life.
Sounds a bit b-school hokey when reduced to three sentences, but I’m in need of a few wins, and a little introspection never hurt anyone, right? Some info I’ve found helpful so far…
- Various resources at the totalleadership.org site
- The syllabus [PDF] from the Spring ‘08 Wharton class
- Stew Friedman’s blog
What experiments have you tried to better align work, home/family, community, and self? Did it work out? Post a comment or e-mail me.
Continue reading Experimenting with work/life alignment
April 9, 2008
UX Lunch: Story of the Ribbon
Next up, Jensen Harris of Microsoft Office’s UX Team presents the design process that led to Office 2007’s “ribbon” interface. It’s an interesting case study of the analysis, iteration of design concepts, and testing of potential solutions.
Download the mp4 video file or a WMV file.
You can check out additional videos from the UX track of Microsoft’s MIX conference, but first you’ll have to install the Silverlight plug-in (like it’s 1996) to browse the site.
See also: The Results-Oriented User Interface: IA, Live Preview, and Micro-Templates, my post on the interface from 2005.
March 31, 2008
UX Lunch: Wayfinding
The second stop in the UX Lunch series is Sylvia Harris’ talk from last year’s IDEA conference. The talk covers an ongoing redesign of wayfinding systems for patients at New York-Presbyterian Hospital. I found the process of organizational change, and even surmounting legal hurdles, to be interesting and a tad familiar.
Download the Powerpoint slides and audio (mp3) and make your own slidecast. Unfortunately a chunk of slides of the design concepts is missing, I assume they were proprietary and couldn’t be shared. I think you’ll get the gist anyhow.